Fast-forward to May 2015 – and the crystal ball is starting to clear

The next 14 months to the general election will be tremendously boring, so why
don’t we cut to the chase?

On March 30 2015, Parliament will be dissolved. Thanks to the unconstitutional Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which was part of the price of the Coalition, this is not a prediction but a matter of law. Unless the Liberal Democrats decide to vote “no confidence” in the Government of which they are a part, we still have a little more than a year left before the formal campaign for the next general election.

This rigidity helps explain the tremendously boring nature of current politics. The argument for fixed-term parliaments was always that the Government could no longer play political games over timing. But what happens instead is worse: the Government clears everything difficult out of the way much too early. MPs have nothing to do. The informal general election campaign takes over everything.

It is therefore already too late – barring some cataclysm – for the political parties to enter anything really new into the public argument. So let me help you skip the coming 14 months of media coverage by suggesting now how the choice in May 2015 will present itself.

The Liberal Democrats will claim that they have proved coalition can work for the national benefit: a Lib Dem vote is not a wasted vote, but one that makes good things happen. The Conservatives will boast that they have achieved economic stability and warn that Labour would bring back chaos. Labour will argue that the Tories have helped the few and not the many, increased poverty and trashed the public services.

How will that choice look? Everyone mocks the Liberals just now, but I don’t think their claim will seem completely threadbare. The raising of the income tax threshold is a big achievement, and it is theirs. They could promise that, in future, no one earning the minimum wage should have to pay income tax. They are reasonable governing partners, with either party.

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The Conservative proposition will be clear, and defensible. At present, growth is not tangible for most people – the majority remains poorer than it was before Gordon Brown finally got his hands on the tiller – but the improvement will be more marked by next year. Steady recovery is the argument that most accords with David Cameron’s public persona, too. He cannot say that he has a great vision for the nation. He cannot expect to be loved. He can say that he is the most competent person to run the country – with the strong implication that his main opponent is not.

Which brings us to Labour. Obviously, its attack on bankers’ greed, energy giants, nasty Tories etc resonates. But it does not add up to a message about how it would govern the country. Labour finds itself in a position like that of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories in 1978. Jim Callaghan’s Labour government seemed to have got over its earlier financial crisis rather nicely, making her dire warnings look extreme. If the ensuing Winter of Discontent had not exceeded her worst prophecies, she might never have reached Downing Street.

Indeed, Labour’s position now is much worse than Mrs Thatcher’s then. She had made clear from the start – it was why she became leader – that her party, under Ted Heath, had lost its way. She proposed a new one. Ed Miliband has not said the same about Labour under Mr Brown, and has left it too late to do so.

The presence of Ed Balls makes this problem really acute. In 1994, Michael Heseltine took his party conference by storm when he identified our dear shadow chancellor (as he now is) as the power behind Labour’s economic policy: “It wasn’t Brown, it was Balls!” Twenty years on, George Osborne should tweak and reverse the sentence in order to show the terrible continuity with which we are threatened: “It’s not just Balls: it’s Brown!”

This is one reason why Mr Miliband cannot get growth in the polls: he is not really adding anything to what Labour always offers. Indeed, his rethinking, though sometimes perceptive about what has gone wrong in Western capitalism, ends up being reflexively Left-wing in its remedies. His message always boils down to this: business has created a problem which government can solve.

The other, related reason is that Mr Miliband’s own personality and demeanour have never convinced people that he can lead. In the contest for “the hovering pencil” – the elector in the voting booth who asks himself if he really believes this man should be in charge – Mr Miliband loses. I cannot think of anything he could do between now and the election to change voters’ minds about this, except to get rid of Mr Balls.

It is true that the Conservatives have many things stacked against them – their failure to get boundary changes through, their piling up of too many votes in too few places, the insistent needle of opinion-formers that Mr Cameron and his pals don’t look very nice and aren’t as nice as they look. But the Tories do have one big message which Labour doesn’t: “They wrecked it: we are fixing it.” (Note the use of the words “are fixing”, rather than “have fixed”. Never imply that the job is done.)

They need to protect themselves from everything that could distract from this message. On no account, for instance, should Mr Cameron agree to take part in leaders’ television debates during the election. Messrs Clegg and Miliband would gang up to make him “the accused” in the dock. It doesn’t matter how flimsy the excuse: even if he is reduced to saying that he needs to wash his hair that night, he must just get out of it.

The Conservatives also need to take the Ukip threat seriously, not by making Right-wing grunts, but by addressing its basic issue. It is already Eurosceptic orthodoxy that Mr Cameron’s referendum plan is just a feint to get the British people to vote Yes to a few cosmetic changes and close the argument down for another generation. To counter this, he will have to do what his advisers detest, and publicly state tough negotiating terms. Only then will voters who care about this subject take heed of the truth of the slogan “Vote Nigel, get Ed”.

This column has a pet theory that all British general election results, including the indecisive ones, are deserved. Last time, Labour deserved to lose, the Liberals deserved to get a look-in, and the Conservatives did not deserve to win outright. If you apply this rule prospectively, the situation is not so different, except that the Tories, having at last given a bit of thought to the economy, do now have the central argument which, in 2010, they lacked. If Moore’s law holds, the Conservatives might just scrape an overall majority in 2015.

Earlier in this piece, though, I mentioned “some cataclysm”. You have only to imagine one – conflict spreading from the Ukraine, the collapse of the euro, a Yes vote in the Scottish referendum – to see how precarious and almost irrelevant our current politics are. That is why they are boring. It is not in the interests of any mainstream political party just now to address the questions about power, money, inter-generational justice, nationality, globalisation and the decline of the West that beset us. The parties have become career vehicles for bright, well-connected, youngish, often shallow people (usually men), rather than broad movements representing strong interests, cultures and traditions.

So the question, “Why vote at all?” no longer has a clear answer. I haven’t really got one; but I would point out that a low turnout in 2015 will almost certainly produce a Labour government which has no idea what to do next.